smb.conf parameter loading.

Andrew Tridgell
Sun, 07 Sep 1997 01:00:52 -0000

Luke wrote:
> and, guess what: reloading all of the services from the smb.conf file
> _doesn't_ force an update in the Connection[] array.  therefore, once a
> connection to a service is made, that's it until the connection is
broken.

Yep, this was a deliberate choice when I did the code. Apart from the
fact that its quite hard to dynamically update current connections I
thought that it wasn't a good idea as it could lead to data loss.

For example, if the new smb.conf removes some share entirely while
someone has it open then you would need to immediately shutdown that
share. As SMB doesn't have a mechanism for telling the client
"you're
about to be disconnected" it would have to be done abruptly. This
means any open files would be immediately closed. This could easily
cause corruption in some applications and would certainly cause nasty
errors to be displayed on the client machine.

So the auto-reload of smb.conf really only affects new connections to
the server. If you want more than that then you need to kill and
restart smbd.

Cheers, Andrew